MRSA in Meat: Why No Recall?

Next week, Congress will hold hearings on the recent recall of more than half a billion eggs infected with salmonella — all of them from two factory farms in Iowa.

That recall, though voluntary, was essential: Salmonella can make you very sick, though if treated on time, it is rarely fatal.

But that’s not the case for MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), or drug-resistant staff infection. In 2005, U.S. hospitals treated more than 278,000 MRSA cases. Nearly 100,000 people faced life threatening illness and 18,650 died: 50 percent more than the number of AIDS death that year.

This evolving superbug sprang from the overuse of antibiotics — not only in hospital settings, but also in animal agriculture, which consumes an estimated 70 percent of all antibiotics sold in this country. Most of those drugs are given at low dose to promote animal growth and prevent disease, a practice that encourages the emergence of multi-drug resistant bacteria.

Now MRSA is showing up in random samples of raw pork sold in supermarkets, and to a lesser extent in beef and chicken. Yet these potentially deadly cuts of meat — unlike the salmonella-tainted eggs — have never been yanked off the shelves.

Why not? Because no government inspector has ever tested live animals or meat for MRSA.

Fortunately, other people have stepped in where government has failed. A University of Iowa study published last year found that one Midwestern hog factory farm was a nonstop breeding pool for the deadly disease: More than a third of all adult swine and 100 percent of the younger pigs aged 9 and 12 weeks were carriers, as were 64 percent of the workers. A second hog factory had zero MRSA infections.

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